As a 12-day international conference on Internet regulation kicks off in Dubai, critics are warning that the closed-door meeting could lead to censorship and even blocked access to the Web in certain countries.

The World Conference on International Telecommunications — known as WCIT — runs from Monday to Dec. 14 in the United Arab Emirates city, with a mandate to review a set of regulations first set in 1988.

Representatives from more than 190 member states will vote on new proposals — submitted confidentially — at the conference, which has come under fire from advocates of Internet freedom.

The International Telecommunication Union, the United Nations agency behind the meeting, says the regulations under review (known as the International Telecommunications Regulations) act as a binding global treaty intended to “facilitate international interconnection and interoperability.”

But Mr. Cerf and others have questioned the role the UN agency should have in global Internet regulation and whether it is attempting to gain more power in that sphere than appropriate.

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More than 300 Canadian groups have signed on, ranging from open-Internet advocacy organization OpenMedia.ca to universities, high schools, unions, yoga studios and radio stations.

Google created a website to host an online petition and encouraged use of the hashtag #freeandopen on social media, which Mr. Cerf linked to in his blog post. As of 4 p.m. ET Monday, more than 1.7 million people had added their names.

Ahead of the conference, member states have submitted confidential proposals but some have turned up on WCITLeaks.org, a website accepting anonymous submissions of leaked documents.

In a guest post on CNN.com, Mr. Cerf said some proposals leaked ahead of the conference include powers for governments to censor legitimate speech, cut off Internet access, ban anonymity from the Web or impose tolls to reach people across borders, making the next YouTube, Facebook or Skype a difficult prospect.

Mr. Cerf said he is not opposed to the ITU itself. “The UN agency has helped the world manage radio spectrum and wired and wireless telephone networks, bringing much needed investment to the developing world.”

However, he said, the agency is not the appropriate body and the WCIT conference is not the right place to make decisions about the future of the Internet, particularly since only governments have a vote while other stakeholders — engineers, Internet companies and those who build and use the Web — are left out.

“A state-controlled system of regulation is not only unnecessary, it would almost invariably raise costs and prices and interfere with the rapid and organic growth of the internet we have seen since its commercial emergence in the 1990s,” he said.

Some have painted the conference as an attempt to wrest control over Web governance away from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is the non-profit, arm’s length body established by the U.S. Department of Commerce. (ICANN is currently overseeing the process of establishing new generic top-level demains to expand beyond the .coms and .nets of today.)

The ITU’s secretary general, Hamadoun Toure, responded to criticism levelled at the meeting and process in an editorial published Nov. 9.

“Contrary to some of the sensationalist claims in the press, WCIT‑12 is definitively not about taking control of the Internet,” he wrote. “Also WCIT‑12 is not in any way about restricting people’s freedom of expression or freedom of speech. WCIT‑12 is about laying down the principles to ensure global connectivity — not global Internet governance.

“From a regulatory perspective — in a networked society — it seems clear that our members do not want heavy-handed regulation or a return to the old days of accounting rates and government-controlled telecommunications.

“But they do seem to be in agreement that new high-level principles are needed, and that there should be coordination and consolidation between agencies at both the national and international levels.”

Mr. Toure said the goal is to make Internet and communications technology more broadly affordable.